Why we went to war with Iraq

It seems that a whole lot of people have forgotten why we went to war with Iraq in 2003. For the unwashed out there, there was a long chain of events that led to our decision to go to war. Here is the original war declaration from October 10th, 2002. I won’t bother pasting the whole thing here, but will distill it down to its fundamentals.

• Iraq’s failure to abide by UN ceasefire protocols from 1991.
• Iraq’s failure to open its borders to WMD inspectors in accordance with repeated UN resolutions.
• Iraq’s failure to abide with the no-fly zone for over a decade.
• Iraq’s support of terrorist groups and terrorists within its borders.
• Iraq’s past history of the use of WMDs on Iranians, its own minorities and its desire to acquire more of these weapons.
• Following the House Resolution 4655 supporting regime change in Iraq.
• Iraq’s history of violence against Kuwait, Bahrain, Israel, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

All of these reasons are simply ignored by those who oppose the war. They want to distill it into simple catchphrases for easy access on the evening news or protest signs. “No blood for oil” or “Bush lied, people died” are some of the most common ones used.

If we really went to war simply for the oil in that country, all we would need to do was secure the oilfields then a 20 mile perimeter on each side of the oil pipeline to the port of Basra. Does anyone out there really think that the US military is incapable of accomplishing this mission? And if we really wanted to “steal” the oil from Iraq, how come oil prices have risen so much in the intervening years? Instead we concentrated on regime change and building up the infrastructure when we could have “stolen” the oil with a lot less effort.

Let’s not forget that Iraq has a history of attempted invasion of other nations around it. They invaded Iran, which started off the Iran-Iraq war, and also invaded Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in 1990. They were a dangerous regime that needed to be dealt with as soon as possible to prevent them from doing more damage to the region.

All of this lead me to believe, as I still do, that Iraq needed to be invaded before their poison infected the rest of the world. The attacks of September 11th changed the world forever. It made it clear that containment was not an option and any nation that supported terror needed to face punishment. The clear proof that this co-called “Bush Doctrine” has been successful is that we have not been attacked since we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan.

I would rather we fight them over there than over here. US soldiers shoot back. Civilians on airplanes do not.

Photo from Zombietime.

1 Comment(s)

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI